Abstract
When I was an undergraduate in the early 1980s, I wrote a paper for my rhetorical criticism class titled, “Terrible Thrills: Hedonistic Pleasure in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The thesis of the paper was that Rocky Horror advocated hedonism, or the desire to achieve pleasure and avoid pain. It traced, in particular, Janet’s journey throughout the film and the pervasive “pleasure-seeking attitude, primarily sexual pleasure, that eventually coerces young Janet to give herself over to ‘sins of the flesh” (Endres 1). Looking through my twenty-something eyes, and integrating philosophies from John Stuart Mills, Jeremy Bentham, and even hedonism’s founding father Epicurus, I concluded that Rocky Horror “embodies the search for, and delivery of, feelings of pleasure” (5).
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